What is a Semantic Phone? Why does it mean I need a mentor?

The machines are getting Superpowers. You need yours.

Computers are still creatures blindly emerging from the primaeval goo. Alive but not able to hold down a proper conversation. Able to consume power but only travel in the direction you have pointed them.

Let’s take search engines as an example. Search engines index the web’s content. They display pages from their index. They can even read the results out to you.

If search engines were intelligent creatures they would reliably be able to take you to the page you want to see. But search engines and technology like Siri have no ability to select the page you want to see.

If you ask Siri to phone someone it has to ask which number to call. With my wife I get asked if I want to call one of four numbers: iPhone, work blackberry, office or home.

Our phones and computers are on the cusp of making the next big leap, as predicted by Tim Berners-Lee in the 1980s! It’s a profound evolution, faster than Darwin could imagine in the 1870s with his theory of evolution.

Our computers are about to be intuitive. They will serve us better. They will go from crawling out of the oceans to have the ability of smart mammals over the next few years.

I’m looking forward to telling my iPhone to call my wife. The phone will think to look up her location, her calendar and take on board many other factors. I’d be happy to be told it would be more appropriate to text her as she’s in a meeting!

The software is about to selectively understand users’ desires. That’s intuition. Tim Berners-Lee called computers with intuition, semantic.

The infrastructure is being put into place. Alexa from Amazon, Siri from Apple, Google Voice, all your data from fee email services, Nest from Hive etc…

Artificial Intelligence technologies are teaching themselves to learn. On the 18th October, Microsoft announced its speech recognition is now accurate as humans. Moore’s law continues to be true, and the hardware is getting more powerful. Everyday computer semantic experiences are now only minutes away.

We have helped the computers achieved what took us billions of years in less than 50 years. It’s a superhuman achievement for humanity